The Arecibo Radio Telescope broadcast the signal on November
16, 1974 during a ceremony marking an upgrade of the Puerto Rico-based
telescope. The transmission can be arranged into a diagram showing, among
other things, a human stick figure, the solar system, the telescope itself
and the DNA molecule.

The signal was "about a million times stronger than
the typical TV transmission," says Frank Drake, the astronomer who
organized the project. As such, he notes, it outshines the sun at a comparable
wavelength and could be detected with technology similar to radio telescopes
on Earth.

The Arecibo message was sent toward M13, a star cluster
some 25,000 light-years away, which means that it will take 25,000 years
to get there. However, the signal will pass near some 30 stars along the
way.

Those are the bare facts concerning Frank Drake's transmission
from Arecibo during the upgrade of that radio telescope.

Sent on November 16, 1974, this radio transmission would
have taken less than 16 years, at least a one-way trip of 8 years to reach
a destination that could receive, decode, and answer the transmission if
the answer is in the crop formation near Hampshire.

The signal was a 3-minute digital transmission. We are
lulled into thinking it looks like a diagram on paper, but that is a translation
of the digital signal into a graphic representation.

As for the crop formation near Chilbolton radio telescope
in Hampshire on August 19th, the liklihood that aliens would even know
that the graphic representation would be on a rectangular medium, as it
is converted to graphic form, and displaying this untransmitted form back
is extremely small to not likely at all. The small changes in the graphic
to reflect an alien source are convenient representations of our own lore
regarding aliens - short with large heads. The pairing of Earth and Mars
seems like a concession to Richard Hoagland. And, if we accept the presence
of Grays right here on earth, we could also conjecture that they would
simply appear in the night and make their own symbols after picking up
the Arecibo transmission from an orbiting spaceship, then decide when the
time is right to return an answer.

Too many questions.

The fact that the Chilbolton radio telescope is nearby
is an indication that someone in that area was knowledgable about Drake's
Arecibo signal and could have contributed information to the (human) circle
makers to construct this elaborate hoax to entertain us. Is that possible?

I believe so, and is more likely than aliens returning
a graphic answer to a digital signal.

If this is an elaborate hoax, think of how humans will
go to such incredible lengths to fool other humans. It has been done before
and is cause for us to be vigilant and extra skeptical when it comes to
events such as these.

If this is an answer from real aliens, then even they
seem to be having a little fun with us at our expense. Certainly, if they
could so easily decipher this signal, they could decipher our languages
and present a little more straight forward proof of their presence.

What a strange article. I refer to: "Answer To 'Arecibo' Crop Circle?
- A Clever Hoax?" by Bill Hamilton.

It seems designed specifically to portray the crop formation
near Chilbolton radio telescope in Hampshire as a hoax message - at all
costs. Sure, you could portray the message as a hoax if you liked, but
at least do it logically and rationally!

Bill Hamilton seems to completely ignore the Prime number
encoding of the message placed there specifically by the SETI experimenters.
The message was encoded in Primes in an extremely logical manner, and
thus Bill Hamiltons suggestion that aliens wouldn't be able to decode it
insults both the intelligence of the scientists who went into making the
original Arecibo message and the intelligence of any potential alien presence
reading it.

And so what if the creators of the response put a rectangle
around their response? A message like that would have to be inverted to
be practically laid out in crops in this manner, or else it could seem
like a bunch of random holes, and then in all likelyhood it could be easily
destroyed if investigated (people would leave tracks) or simply ignored
completely. If you're trying to get peoples attention with a message,
you don't create one that could be easily destroyed or ignored. Now if
you invert the image, so its not so susceptible to damage upon investigation,
and so that its noticeable, then yes, now you need to create some kind
of a border arounf it (out of simple necessity - unless you wanted to flatten
the whole damn field). Well since the message is in the form of a 2 dimensional
23*73 grid, umm, how about a rectangle?!

Bill Hamiltons conjecture summarises as follows:

1) The original Arecibo message as sent is too difficult
to decode and view in its intended form - graphically. Therefore Frank
Drake and the entire SETI team are complete idiots. In 1974, they created
and sent the most powerful broadcast ever deliberately beamed into space
without actually creating this message in a manner that it could be understood
by anyone. 2) Advanced alien races (advanced enough to be capable of receiving
the message) are all incredibly stupid as they are all incapable of understanding
the universal language of mathematics as well as employing simple logic
and reasoning. Given a message of length 1679, they completely fail to
think "hey someone sent a message, I wonder if they did something
logical like encode it in primes", and as such completely fail to
notice that the message had a length of a composite of two primes (23 and
73). Then because of these utter failures of simple logic and reasoning,
they never view this set of binary data in this message the only two ways
that were likely intended by the sender. So they don't render the image
both ways as a 23*73 and 73*23 grid, and as such they never find the visual
pattern hidden in the first of these. 3) Because the aliens (which could
originate from anywhere) drew themselves with big eyes and a big head,
they must therefore be of the type referred to in popular culture as Grays.
4) Because we can think of a million different possible ways that aliens
could use to communicate with us, the fact that they could have chosen
to communicate with us using the same method we attempted to communicate
with them can be discounted entirely.

I could go on, but suffice to say:

I don't know whether the Arecibo-response message is
a hoax or not, perhaps some analysis of the bend in the stems of the bent
crops (and whether there is breakage as is common with obvious hoax circles)
could yeild some answers. But I do know that Bill Hamiltons analysis as
to it being a genuine message from alien intelligence or a hoax seems very
forced and biased toward the latter. Indeed, to the point he insults the
intelligence of the SETI experimenters, and the intelligence of any potential
alien recipient of the Arecibo message.

Indeed, as those points are both obviously true, it also
insults the intelligence of the reader of his article... which in this
case, was me.